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Changing Face of the Yoga Industry, Its Dharmic Roots and Its Message to Women: an Analysis of Yoga Journal Magazine Covers, 1975–2020

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Abstract

Contemporary yoga is popularly represented in various media by a fit, white woman. Yoga Journal is a magazine recognized by many as an industry cornerstone and an institution in and of itself. It represents the distinctive face of yoga. By analyzing the visual and textual content of the Yoga Journal magazine covers, from its first issue in 1975 to issue 313 (January 2020), we describe the produced and consumed portrait of yoga. By focusing on the cover themes, together with the objects and persons depicted, we recognize three phases of development that have contributed to the understanding of the changing image of yoga in the media. While, in the initial phase, yoga was represented as a mystical and mysterious spiritual discipline that originated in the Orientalized East, in the later phase, it was depicted first as a global and universal phenomenon and then as a mainstream everyday fitness regime. Yoga’s depiction in the last phase is compatible with the scholarly representation of contemporary yoga as posture and body centered, but not with its earlier depictions. We found that in its mature phase, the yoga body, which is criticized for its lack of inclusiveness, emerged to become omnipresent. We conclude that the newly formed face of yoga is problematic, both for its female readers, who are encouraged to conform to a unique body type, and also for the yoga community, which encounters an appearance-based restriction of access.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for valuable feedback on an early draft of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

    Agi Wittich

  2. Japan Society for the Promotion of Science – Post-Doctoral Fellow – Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan

    Patrick McCartney

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  1. Agi Wittich
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Correspondence to Agi Wittich.

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Wittich, A., McCartney, P. Changing Face of the Yoga Industry, Its Dharmic Roots and Its Message to Women: an Analysis of Yoga Journal Magazine Covers, 1975–2020. DHARM 3, 31–44 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42240-020-00071-1

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